We have a large SharePoint 2010 farm running on VMWare ESX cluster. Based on the hardware underpinning this environment and the given load (which is light), we feel like the servers are responding slower than they should be. No errors or anything like that are happening; it just feels sluggish. This is common across several different application tiers (separate farms on separate hardware/clusters) so we want to investigate our VMWare configuration.

My questions:

How do I approach tuning a VMWare environment for SharePoint?

What sort of things should I investigate first?

Are there any configuration recommendations for hosting SharePoint on VMWare
(either on the VMWare side or SharePoint side) I should be aware of?

I know there is a lot of variation amongst hardware platforms. I am looking for anything specific you may have encountered that could help us improve our VMWare performance.

It's the same code across multiple tiers. I think generally excludes #1 and #2 above. We have similar sluggishness in CA so we don't think it is pure code problem. How can I determine if disk or network IO is not being compounded by VMWare layer?
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Wade HendersonSep 28 '11 at 17:14

Make sure you have the right hardware. Make sure your chip (whether Intel or AMD) can handle virtualization (you can go into BIOS and check that). 64-bit machine is better for performance although 32-bit with virtual support will work too. I dont see anything special you have to do.

SharePoint 2010 does not support 32-bit!
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Lars FastrupSep 28 '11 at 16:24

I'm pretty sure our entire stack is 64-bit. I will double check that we're not doing something wacky like running 64-bit Windows on top of 32-bit ESX, if that is even possible. +1 for suggesting something to investigate.
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Wade HendersonSep 28 '11 at 17:18